America Needs a Bunker to Store Its Mountain of Toxic TVs

Image: Basel Action Network

The mountain of broken down televisions and computer screens caught fire at around 11 o’clock in the morning, sending a thick plume of grey smoke over the tiny Utah town of Parowan. Soon, about ten fire trucks from neighboring towns Paragonah and Brian joined local firefighters on the scene, and authorities shut down an entire mile of Interstate 15.

The firefighters extinguished the blaze within a few hours, but the larger danger remains. The March 2 fire was just one symptom of enormous problem that’s spreading across the country. As we move to flat screen TVs and computer displays, we’re discarding our big, bulky old school televisions and CRT monitors, and they’re piling up in warehouses like the one that caught fire in Parowan, with nowhere to go. These discarded screens aren’t just a fire hazard. They’re filled with lead and other toxic materials.

In California alone, more than 100 million pounds of leaded CRT monitors glass is recovered each year, according to CalRecycle, the state’s recycling agency. In some states, recycling programs have provided cash incentives for companies to haul away junky old monitors and TVs, but there’s almost no secondary market for the biggest parts of these monitors. So they just sit there, in massive piles. Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona. The stockpile in Parowan, Utah had not been abandoned, but just months earlier, state environmental officials had ordered its owner, Stone Castle Recycling, to move the waste out of the facility because of environmental code violations.

Environmentalists say there’s no obvious solution to the problem, but that means it’s time for the government to step in. At the very least, we need a place where this growing pile of glass and lead can be cleaned and stored until we know what to do with it. We need a Yucca Mountain for all our CRTs.

Billions of Pounds of Leaded Glass

If you’ve ever hauled one of the bulky monitors that were universal before the advent of flat panel displays, you’ll know that they are remarkably heavy. That’s because, behind the screen, there’s a big funnel of heavy leaded glass designed to be sturdy and to protect consumers from radiation leakage. The glass is recyclable, and for awhile, U.S. recyclers were able to ship it off for reuse in other countries.

But today, there are only a handful of places that will accept this leaded glass. There’s a lead smelter in Mississippi, and two more in Canada. And an Indian company, Videocon, is buying it too. But the pipeline of abandoned CRTs is spewing out far more leaded glass than the market can bear. “Nowadays, everything is flat panels. There’s just no use for the glass,” says Earl Campbell, owner of E-Waste Harvesters in Phoenix. “What you’re left with is this glass that you literally have to pay to get rid of.”

Over the past year, at least a half dozen warehouses filled with CRT debris have been abandoned in places like Baltimore, Cincinnati, Denver, and Yuma, Arizona.

Ten years ago, Videocon was paying recyclers between $100 and $200 a ton for their leaded glass, says Jeff Hunts, a manager with CalRecycle. Today, recyclers have to pay Videocon $100 to $200 per ton just to take the glass away.

California pays recycling companies about $10 per monitor to haul away these old school TVs. Typically, they’re moved to processing facilities where they can bet stripped of copper, plastic, and circuit boards. The recycling companies can sell all of this waste, but that still leaves the leaded glass in the CRTs. And getting rid of that costs money. So, instead, companies simply store the old monitors or glass in warehouses — warehouses that are increasingly being abandoned.

One company — Dow Management — was paid by about ten California recycling companies to haul away about 10 million tons of old monitors and TVs over a three-year period. According to Hunts and Arizona state officials, Dow stuffed them into a warehouses Los Angeles and Arizona, and simply walked away from the toxic glass, leaving the California recyclers and local officials to clean up the mess. Dow’s website is still active, but the company didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment and a number listed on the website has been disconnected. Stat officials believe that its operators have fled the country.

A National Junk Monitor Graveyard?

The recycling trade publication Resource Recycling has recorded a mini-boom in abandoned warehouses stuffed with old CRT monitors, each one a miniature ecological disaster for local officials, says Jerry Powell, executive editor with Resource Recycling. The numbers add up: 1,500 tons in Cincinnati; 8,000 tons in Denver; 10,000 tons in Halsted Pennsylvania and Vestal New York; 3,000 giant “gaylord” boxes in Baltimore Maryland. “It’s a nationwide problem,” says Powell.

Resource Recycling expects Videocon will stop accepting leaded glass altogether within five years, but people are still throwing out their monitors. Because many of these facilities include mountains of broken leaded glass, they’re all mini environmental disasters in the making. Lead can leech into the water system and can cause organ damage when ingested by humans.

So what to do? Jim Puckett, founder of the Basel Action Network, the environmental watchdog group that has most carefully watched this situation, says we should clean the glass and then basically bank it for the future. That is to say, storing it in “carefully prepared landfill cells,” where it cannot leech out and damage the local environment. To do that, though, will most likely take federal action by an agency such as the Environmental Protection Agency. An EPA spokeswoman didn’t have any immediate comment for this story.

Puckett’s idea is not a long-term solution, but it’s better than the toxic surprises that are popping up over the country right now. “I think we need to sequester it,” he says. “It is glass and it is lead and some day someone might be able to find a use for that stuff.”

“Of course the ultimate solution is to design products with end-of-life in mind,” he says.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.